Magee received his Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral degrees in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Carnegie Institute of Technology.
[1] After completing his Ph.D. studies in 1966, Magee joined Ford Motor Company as a research scientist and development engineer till 1976.
[citation needed] Magee worked on the transformation, structure and strength of ferrous materials in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
[2] His quantitative study of martensite formation included an analytical model of transformation at various temperatures known as the Magee equation.
[3] Magee found that the weight percentage of carbon in the alloys determined the deformation in both the lenticular-tetragonal and packet-cubic martensites.
His research identified the meaningful suppression of twinning in higher carbon cubic martensites and with D. W. Hoffman theoretically explained this effect.
[5] In a separate study, Magee and Thornton found that the energy absorbing efficiency was independent of foam density while being an important function of alloy and heat treatments.
He presented a model based on the inventive design process that also provided an explanatory foundation for the phenomena of exponential time dependence of functional technical performance.